ON THE CHURCH AT WORTH. BY W. S. WALFORD, ESQ., F.S.A. THE village of Worth is in the hundred of Buttinghill. The parish is extensive in proportion to the population. The church stands about a mile eastward of the Three Bridges station on the London and Brighton Railway. It has long been regarded as an object of curiosity, and supposed by some to be very old; by others to occupy an ancient site, and to be, in part at least, of rare antiquity. When Sir W. Burrell visited it in 1775, his attention was arrested by the chancel arch, which he thought much older than the rest of the building. In more recent times, an antiquity, which I apprehend it would be very difficult to prove, has sometimes been claimed, if not for the building itself, yet for the site, as that of a very early Anglo-Saxon church. The history of churches in this country, even when they are in all probability of earlier date than the Conquest, can rarely be carried back beyond the compilation of Domesday. Unfortunately for my present subject, no mention of Worth-neither of the church, nor even of the place-can be discovered in that record. We have therefore no evidence from it as to whether a church did or did not exist there at that time. The non-mention in Domesday of a church at any particular place is not conclusive that there was not one. It was no part of the design of that survey to comprise the churches. In some parts of it they are entered; in others they seem uniformly omitted, unless they had land belonging to them which fell within the inquiry of the Conqueror's commissioners. However in this case, though other Sussex churches are given, yet, since none of the lands in the parish can be identified, that no notice of the church can be discovered need not excite any doubt as to the |